I am about to move my Wordpress powered site from the previous host here to Dreamhost.

My site has the Multisite feature turned on.

Does Dreamhost generally support the Multisite function of Wordpress?

And… Can I do the subdomain setup?

Will this mess up the ability to have other subdomains not a part of the multisite?

Just a general question for when I start moving the website to dreamhost sometime soon.

I’d appreciate any input I can get. I contacted tech support as well.

Update at 4:22pm Central Standard Time 9/24/2013

Well whatdya know. I have been searching this forum and the wiki with “muli site” and getting nothing. I searched “multisite” and got this wonderful link which answered some of my questions: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/WordPress_Multisite

I’m still interested in any input that anybody has though. Especially regarding how to manually map a subdomain via multisite on Wordpress.

I need to know this too if someone has some insight that could help us out? NetJon, I would like to know how you are doing your sub-domain arrangement and I didn’t even think of that being an issue with the dreamhost platform.

I need to know this too if someone has some insight that could help us out? NetJon, I would like to know how you are doing your sub-domain arrangement and I didn’t even think of that being an issue with the dreamhost platform.

Hey Jake!

Let me tell you what I’ve learned so far.

Tech support got back to me and said that they basically do not support multisite. They specifically managed the whole wildcard redirect thing. On the other hand this link says you can do it, just without the wildcard and be careful about resource usage: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/WordPress_Multisite

After importing my entire Wordpress Multisite Installation from my old webhost (I won’t go into that) I began to try and figure out manually setting up subdomains.

b) For “Do you want the www in your URL?” I selected “Leave it alone.”

c) For “Web Directory” I changed the file from the automatically generated “subdomain.yourdomain.com” to my default file for the main wordpress website: “yourdomain.com” in my case. (Wordpress does the sorting of the subdomain when it arrives).

d) I didn’t mess with any other settings

e) I clicked “fully host this domain.”

f) I went in to my wordpress multisite admin area (already previously setup on a previous webhost) and created the subdomain that I wanted there).

g) I gave some time for the DNS settings to spread around the internet.

h) It worked fine!

So… I don’t know if that helps you or not. I did have problems importing my previous sub sites. But I only had one so I may just re-create it.

Or… I may still figure out.

I’d be very curious to know if that helps you figure out your situation.

Blessings,
[hr]
P.S. I am only using the multisite feature because I have different areas of the website and I’d rather not install a bunch of separate wordpress installations. I am not using it for “anyone to have a blog.” So there is no risk, really, of draining the resources. I think they are trying to discourage a public anyone-can-sign-up kinda thing because they don’t what what you are doing to get too big!

Can you use Multisite? Sure. But there is a small handful of experts out there on it, and most are hired off to run a specific multisite. Which is why we don’t really support it. It’s a very niche, complicated, thing, and I would never run it on shared, personally. Running 3 sites on Multisite is exactly the same, resource wise, as 3 separate sites. So … y’know, it’s really that it’s harder, more complicated, and … harder I love it, mind you.

You should be able to do it by mirroring the domain. If you have subdomain.domain.com mirror domain.com, it’ll keep the URL and WP should be okay with that. Other wise, the fully hosting is the way to go.

Can you use Multisite? Sure. But there is a small handful of experts out there on it, and most are hired off to run a specific multisite. Which is why we don’t really support it. It’s a very niche, complicated, thing, and I would never run it on shared, personally. Running 3 sites on Multisite is exactly the same, resource wise, as 3 separate sites. So … y’know, it’s really that it’s harder, more complicated, and … harder I love it, mind you.

You should be able to do it by mirroring the domain. If you have subdomain.domain.com mirror domain.com, it’ll keep the URL and WP should be okay with that. Other wise, the fully hosting is the way to go.

Thanks Ipstenu!

I’m glad to see that there’s somebody out there reading these things.

My main reason for doing mutlisite instead of separate wordpress installations is ease of management from one dashboard. I’m only using it for several subdomains of my own (not making it available to others).

I didn’t have any problem installing multisite or using it. I found it quite easy. Although, while I am not a “professional,” I am not really a Wordpress Beginner either. I’ve been using and tweaking it for years.

And I think I am almost “professional” in my ability to cut and paste code.

Although, I would agree with the idea that someone who isn’t already really comfortable using Wordpress wouldn’t want to do this, because using Multisite does involve manually adding some code to your files, which I did via ftp.

On a side note: Now that I have walked through this process, I wouldn’t ask the original question the same way.

I think most support types take “support” to mean “will you help me set this up and solve problems if it breaks.” Whereas, I only meant “will the server software and various policies support this technically.”

I now know that the answer to that question is “yes, accept for the wildcard redirect.”